Sunday, 16 March 2014

easy apple pear soup recipe

Fruits like apple and pear are suitable to cook clear and refreshing soup, especially for hot summer or dry spell (kemarau) such as an extreme one that we had in Singapore in February-March 2014. It is the driest one since 1869 for Singapore!

The apple pear soup (苹果雪梨汤) is good to soothe throat and clear phlegm.

Snow pear is known for its cooling and thirst-quenching properties.

The benefits of apple have been epitomized in a saying that "an apple a day keeps the doctor away."

Once, a little girl shared to me that she dislikes apples because Snow White died after having a bite of a poisonous apple. I was inspired by how her mother, instead of lecturing her on the goodness of apples and forcing her to eat apples, asked the little girl a thought-provoking question.

"Darling, do you think the Prince will be allowed to kiss Snow White if she has not eaten the apple?"

"If there is no kiss from the Prince, do you feel that Snow White will immediately fall in love to the Prince once she opens her eyes?"

While it is essential to guide our children to be prudent - not to accept food from a stranger without an approval of parents / teachers, I found that it is also equally meaningful to reflect if our past encounters are blessings in disguise. What do you think?

A man whom I have been greatly grateful to is Sir Isaac Newton, an English physicist, mathematician and great thinker.

On a windy afternoon in a colorful autumn, Newton walked at a beautiful garden. * Taking a rest under an apple tree, Newton saw a ripen apple fell to the ground.

He did not reach out to eat the crunchy red apple, as what some of us might do. However, his mind was searching for the possible explanations why apple always fall perpendicularly to the ground.

"Why not fall sideways? Why not upwards?"

After meandering, thinking, and pondering, Newton explains:

"Every object draws every other object toward it.
The more matter an object contains the harder it
draws.
The nearer an object is to another the harder it
draws.
The harder an object draws other objects, the heavier
it is said to be.
The earth is many millions of times heavier than an
apple;
so it draws the apple toward it millions and
millions of times harder than the apple can draw the
other way."

Thanks to a humble event that nature offered Newton a glimpse of (the falling of an apple), Newton described the effect of gravity and defined the law of universal gravitation.